“Like a child who dreams of flying and begs for something more

We hold a dim remembrance of an ancient golden shore…”  -Randy Stonehill  The Wild Frontier

  Hear this song here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsCdWrIpUW4

Haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Presents, we spend this month of December shopping, budgeting, partying, over-indulging and hoping that somewhere in the busy-ness we will – like the Grinch or George Bailey – chance upon the ‘real meaning of Christmas’.  Often the season passes leaving us frustrated, depressed, overweight and in debt.  But that desire to ascribe a universal truth to this season is a memory - of sorts- of a long gone garden where God walked face to face with his beloved in the cool of each evening.  Deep down, we believe in a place of perfect joy, universal peace, and goodwill toward all mankind. 

All humanity believes in utopia.  Every world religion teaches this  concept, New Agers speak of the age of Aquarius, and even atheists talk of higher levels of evolution that will create harmony for all mankind in the future.  These beliefs are all evidence of a distant echo from that garden that once stood between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where the lion laid down with the lamb and we were naked and unashamed. 

So Christmas is a natural time for these echoes of utopia past – or perhaps the distant rumbling of utopia future - to resound a little louder.  The problem is, we‘re looking  for the source of these reverberations in the mall when they originated in a stall.  The ‘real meaning of Christmas’ is that a bridge was built between Eden and eternity.  The entrance to the bridge is a foul smelling, fly infested barn and it exits through an empty tomb - no longer onto that ‘ancient golden shore’ but into a new golden city where the one so often lost in the tumult of this season will reign over an eternal season of peace and goodwill.